Anyone use Microsoft eco system?

In general I think Microsoft plays pretty well across all platforms.

Skydrive is available for all platforms (WP, iOS, Amdroid)
Hotmail/Outlook works on all three (MS have a dedicated Outlook app on Android too, not sure about iOS)

The big space MS are lacking cross platform is XBOX Music from what I've seen. The ability to play music on Google Music on all of my devices (iOS - GMusic, WP - Gooroovster, Windows8 GMusic, native Amdroid support) makes the service invaluable to me.

They pretty much have most of it covered if you we're to jump over to MS services.

I use skydrive and outlook. Both very good, skydrive is well priced and outlook is refreshing. Xbox music while nice on the Xbox is not worth it yet, it is too closed off, this may change.

Personally I switched from Google just to try something different, nothing else. The Microsoft alternative works just as well but not better.

paulsalter said:

I am currently using all google for my eco system and works well on my iOS, Android and MacBook

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Why are you switching then?

For me, it's Microsoft for mail and calendar, and Google Docs for personal documents. With Google dropping ActiveSync, device agnostic me decided to drop Google for calander and to do list (Hotmail was already my main email account).

I still use GMail for my main email because I chat on it, but I use Outlook.com, SkyDrive (main cloud), and Office 365 (main word processor, spreadsheet, and note taking) as well on my Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, and XBOX. Works well for me and I easily have everything I do across all my devices.

Its nice editing documents, adding to Excel spreadsheets, or reviewing my OneNotes on my phone without worry of breaking anything.

Microsofts is one of the best. I'd argue even better than apple's. Skydrive is fantastic. Especially if you have the grandfathered 25gb of free storage (new standard is 7gb). Office 365 is also great. I'm very much a fan of it and have been since the Windows live days.

I think once you take the time to set everything up it's ok. I do prefer Google for basically everything, since I've been on Gmail since it was beta. But MS is ok. Skydrive is much more flexible than iCloud. I don't really like the outlook web interface much, but on a windows phone everything shows up nice and clean. I had kind of a hard time getting contacts onto my windows phone initially, but I think that was just me.

Overall I think MS is #2 when it comes to cloud services, right behind google. iCloud is great in a lot of ways but I don't think Apple even knows what they really want it to be just yet. With some tweaking iCloud could easily be #1, but it's not mature enough yet. That being said I do use all three.

I am considering jumping ship to a cheap windows 17inch intel i7 machine to use for general computing and watching streaming videos. My problem is that I can never give up my macbook pro completely because of garageband as I'm a musician. but these days with google I don't need ios for calendar, mail, music or pictures and video. my ideal setup might look something like a galaxy note 2 for phone, a ipad mini for apple apps, and a 17 inch acer for powerhouse computing. ONLY problem is how awesome garageband and imovie are for recording music and videos. so I might suck it up and get a 17inch mbp

TacticalDesire said:

Microsofts is one of the best. I'd argue even better than apple's. Skydrive is fantastic. Especially if you have the grandfathered 25gb of free storage (new standard is 7gb). Office 365 is also great. I'm very much a fan of it and have been since the Windows live days.

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I wish that they allowed prior accounts to be merged for the skydrive storage. I have a @hotmail account with 25GB but I no longer use this as I have a @outlook account.

Still I subscribe to Office 365 which gives you 20GB additional space for a total of 27GB. Would love to make that 45GB instead

I went full out MS, and it was good for a while. But they replaced zune with xbox music, the music app on the metro platform is terrible without paying $10/month, streaming to other devices hardly works, netflix streaming on the xbox costs $60/year...

Basically I'll wait to see where Microsoft goes with the next xbox, but if they continue on their SaaS model, and Apple keeps up the price gouging, I'll probably get my own NAS and make my own cloud solution.

Having said that, I use skydrive and it's fantastic.

I use both ecosystems at home and both seem to work well. Apples is definitely more polished but not nearly as flexible as Microsoft and SkyDrive.

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DeSnousa said:

I wish that they allowed prior accounts to be merged for the skydrive storage. I have a @hotmail account with 25GB but I no longer use this as I have a @outlook account.

Still I subscribe to Office 365 which gives you 20GB additional space for a total of 27GB. Would love to make that 45GB instead

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Did you try submitting a ticket to support? I was in the same spot as you when the switch over to outlook.com started happening. I submitted a ticket and all the stuff showing that I had been grandfathered in and they migrated all my stuff over to the outlook.com account. I now have 45 GB of storage for only 10 bucks a year.

SkyDrive is so awesome that it just might be Microsoft's saving grace as long as they don't screw it up like XBOX music.

paulsalter said:

1) I fancy a change from using all Google, so wondered how it was working for others

2) I am planning on replacing my MacBook with a Windows laptop later in the year, so I was thinking the MS eco system would work the best here, as long as it works well with everything else I have

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Fair enough. Of the three Google is definitely the most cross platform but if you're using Windows (and intend to keep on using it) this point is not really relevant.

The main factor is how important music is to you. IMO nothing comes close to Google's cloud music service, and it's free (including the matching features).

MS ecosystem is great, I loved Hotmail, but am not super thrilled with Outlook.com as it seems kind of slow and weirdly refreshes a lot, skydrive is pretty awesome, skype, etc. Also google turned me off when they hamstrung calendar so I switched over to windows calendar which is just as good but more integrated with my ecosystem anyhow.

The only move I haven't made is on my phone. I really do want to support MS, but I am not really in love with any of the hardware that is out there yet and would like to wait for their app store to grow.

I just ordered a 17 inch Dell to use for watching videos and surfing the Web. Im going to be testing how well my Google ecosystem works over 3 platforms. Android phone. Mac osx and Windows 8